LITTLE SAINT

A rarity: a literal hagiography, but much more.

Novelist Green (The Dead of the House, 1972) here relates the story of Saint Foy, a young girl betrayed by her father and put to death by Roman authorities for her Christian faith in about A.D. 290. The site of her martyrdom, a village in southwestern France called Conques, has long been an important center of pilgrimage and healing, served by both the warm springs of the Massif Central and a local belief in miracles wrought by the saint’s benevolent spirit. Green relates Foy’s story, with sometimes overwrought emotion, in a poetic narrative that celebrates the young girl’s constancy, a story that will be of great appeal to readers of all beliefs. Perhaps even more importantly, Green (who died in 1996) spent much of the last quarter-century of her life in and around Conques, and she paints a loving portrait of village life in a little-visited part of France—a poor place abandoned by its young and inhabited largely, it seems, by partisan veterans of WWII with a long memory for the injuries inflicted by the Germans and their homegrown collaborators. Green’s cast of characters includes wizened widows, a sardonic village priest, and cigarette-puffing farmers whose language and customs retain an air of the medieval. “The writer who uses ennui in [the local manner] today is committing an archaïsme,” she writes of one turn of phrase. “Yet this is the way the people here talk, and it is only one example of an older French that survives here along with the ancient langue d'oc.”

More learned than most travelogues, this fond remembrance of both a little girl who suffered for her faith and the people who work a stony land today is immensely appealing.